Microsoft launced their beta MSN Search

Hmmm. so that's probably why Google announced their updated index. A little rain on Microsoft's parade, which, as I learned just now have announced the beta of their search engine.

The msn search adds a new twist in advanced search, re-christened as Search builder. I think it aims to make advanced searches more accessible for ordinary internet users. Search customization fields are presented in sections, one tab at a time. A very interesting addition in MSN search not found in Google and Yahoo's advanced searches is a way for users to tweak the ranking of the results page, based on three criteria: exactness of match, popularity and freshness of the result. As I remember just now, a similar feature is present when searching in Google News (the ability to sort results by relevance or by date). Microsoft also says that your location, which can be set on the settings page, can have an effect on the search results that you will get.

We have yet to see though if these features can create a serious dent on Google's share of the search advertising market. At its current form, Google is pretty much hard to beat, and that is good, because if Microsoft or Yahoo is indeed capable of doing so, we users can expect a lot of good things to come that will make searching for information on the web a lot easier.

By the way, as I was making this blog post, i came upon Yahoo's new search page (not the Yahoo home page), hmm. Can you spot the difference between that and Google's? Well it was pretty hard so to help me and to make the circus a lot more fun, i tried to search for it (using MSN search of course!). Don't click on that link. It's nonsense. I have to stop here...